This invention relates to shipping and storage pallets and more particularly to plastic pallets embodying a twin sheet construction.
Pallets have traditionally been formed of wood. Wood pallets, however, have many disadvantages. For example, they are subject to breakage and thus are not reusable over an extending period of time. Wood pallets also take up a considerable amount of valuable floor space in the warehouse when they are not in use. In an effort to solve some of the problems associated with wood pallets, plastic pallets have been developed and employed with some degree of success. In one generally successful form of plastic pallet design, upper and lower plastic sheets are formed in separate molding operations and the two sheets are then selectively fused or knitted together in a suitable press to form a reinforced double wall or "twin sheet" structure. In one popular twin sheet construction, a plurality of parallel linearly extending upwardly opening channels are provided in the upper sheet and a like plurality of parallel linearly extending downwardly opening channels are provided in the lower sheet with the upper and lower channels angled with respect to each other and fused or knitted together at their interfaces. These twin sheet plastic pallets, although substantially more durable than the wooden pallets that they replace, tend to have a substantially higher initial cost than the corresponding wooden pallets due in large part to the relatively high cost of the raw plastic material required to form the pallet. It is therefore critical that the twin sheet type of pallet embody a structural design that maximizes the structural strength of the pallet for a given amount of plastic material employed to form the pallet.